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“The culture of New Age Racism also brought blacks to the
age of Oprah” – Elaine Brown, 2002

“A Real Black-Tie Event:” Love, Tears, and Racial Progress

I recently caught a snippet of television that was relevant for
understanding the savage persistence of stark racial inequality
in the United States. I was flipping the dial late at night and
caught part of Oprah. She was speaking to Oscar favorite Jamie
Fox, who appeared on a giant screen, sitting in front of a piano.
They were talking about his experience playing Ray Charles in
the movie “Ray.”

The multi-billionaire Oprah mentioned that she realized she could
“be anything I wanted to be” when Sidney Poitier won the first
Academy award ever given to an African American. She told Jamie
that she loved him. The multi-millionaire Jamie informed Oprah
that he loved her back.

They spoke cheerfully about the significant black presence that
will be displayed at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, which
is being hosted by the black comedian Chris Rock. “It’s really
going to be a black-tie event this year,” Jamie said. Everybody
laughed.

Jamie played a song on the piano. Oprah and Jamie exchanged
some more “I love yous.” It looked like Oprah was tearing up.
Many of her predominantly white female audience members seemed
equally moved.

They were happy for Jamie and Oprah and Chris Rock and all the
other African-Americans who have “made it” in the United States.
And they were happy for America’s benevolent decision to slay
the beast of racism and open the doors of equal opportunity to
all.It was another chance for white self-congratulationand for whites to forget about – and lose more sympathy for
– the large number of black Americans who are nowhere close to
making it in post-Civil Rights America.

Still Savage Inequalities

For a considerable portion of whites in “post-Civil Rights” America,
black-white integration and racial equality are more than just
accepted ideals. They are also, many believe, accomplished
realities, showing that we have overcome racial disparity.
According to a survey conducted by the Washington Post,
the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, and Harvard University in the
spring of 2001, more than 4 in 10 white Americans believe that
blacks are “as well off as whites in terms of their jobs, incomes,
schools, and health care.”

The 2000 US Census numbers that were being crunched as this poll
was taken did not support this belief. More than
three and a half decades after the historic victories of the black
Civil Rights Movement, the census showed, equality remained
a highly elusive goal for African-Americans. In a society that
possesses the highest poverty rate and the largest gaps between
rich and poor in the industrialized world, blacks are considerably
poorer than whites and other racial and ethnic groups. Economic
inequality correlated so closely with race that:

African-Americans were twice as likely to
be unemployed as whites.

To attain equal employment in the United States
between blacks and white, 700,000 more African-Americans would
have had to be moved out of unemployment and nearly two million
African-Americans would have to be promoted into higher paying
positions.

The poverty rate for blacks was more than
twice the rate for whites.

Nearly one out of every two blacks earned
less than $25,000 but one in three whites made that little.

Median black household income ($27,000) was
less than two thirds of median white household income ($42,000).

Black families’ median household net worth
was less than 10 percent that of whites. The average
white household has a net worth of $84,000 but the average black
household is worth only $7,500.

Blacks were much less likely to own their
own homes than whites. Nearly three-fourths of white families
but less than half of black families owned their homes.

Meanwhile, blacks were 12.3 percent of U.S. population, but comprised
nearly half of the roughly 2 million Americans currently behind
bars. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of black men in jail or
prison grew fivefold (500 percent), to the point where, the Justice
Policy Institute reported in 2002, there were more black men behind
bars than enrolled in colleges or universities in the U.S. On
any given day, 30 percent of African-American males ages 20 to
29 were under correctional supervision – either in jail or prison
or on probation or parole. According to the best social science
estimates in 2002, finally, one in five black men was saddled
with a prison record and an astounding one in three black
men possessed a felony record.

“They’ve Got the NBA – What More Do They Want?”

Ask white Americans who think that blacks are equal to (or even
ahead of) whites what exactly they are talking about and you won’t
get census data. You’ll hear about Oprah, Michael Jordan, Condoleezza
Rice, Colin Powell, Barack Obama, the guy who leads Jay Leno’s
band, or the black lawyer or doctor who recently moved into their
neighborhood. The white father of a white friend of mine contributes
the following pearl of wisdom regarding what he sees as black
Americans’ exaggerated sense of grievance and entitlement: “they’ve
got the NBA – what more do they want?”

Wildly popular among white viewers, “The Cosby Show” helped fuel
some of this sort of thinking during the Reagan era. As left culture
critic Mark Crispin Miller noted in a 1986 essay titled “Cosby
Knows Best,” the affluent, hyper-consumerist, apolitical African-American
Huxtable family – headed by the affable, impish obstetrician Cliff
(played by Dr. Cosby himself) – functioned as “an ad, implicitly
proclaiming the fairness of the American System: ‘Look! [Cosby
shows us] Even I can have all this!’” “On ‘The Cosby show,’” Miller
noted, “it appears as if blacks in general can have, and do have,
what many whites enjoy and that such material equality need not
entail a single break-in. And there are no hard feelings, none
at all, now that the old injustices have been so easily rectified.”
Consistent with its mission of selling the American System and
the related idea that America’s racial divisions had been overcome,
“The Cosby Show” refused to permit any “negativity” on the screen.
“This is a conscious policy,” Miller noted, observing that “Dr.
Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, reads through
each script as a ‘consultant,’ censoring any line or bit that
might somehow tarnish the show’s ‘positive image.’ And the show’s
upscale mise-en scene has also been deliberately contrived
to glow, like a fixed smile. ‘When you look at the artwork [on
the show’s walls], there is a positive feeling, an up-feeling,’
Cosby says. ‘You don’t see downtrodden, negative I Can’t Do, I
won’t do.’”

Separatism and Its Consequences

Part of the problem behind many whites’ racial equality understanding
gap is segregation, which continues at high levels. White women
might flock en masse to their black princess Oprah’s Chicago
television studio to receive inspiration, wisdom, and (on lucky
days) surplus commodities, but Oprah’s home city is harshly segregated
by race. The Chicago metropolitan area has a black-white dissimilarity
measure of 80.8, meaning that more than four out of every five
area blacks would have to move for African-Americans to be distributed
evenly with whites throughout the metropolitan area. Within
Chicago, 74 percent of black residents live in neighborhoods
that are 90 percent or more African-American. The average
Chicago black lives in a census tract where 4 of every 5 residents
(81.1%) are African-American, while the average white lives in
a census tract where less than 1 in 10 people (8.9 percent) is
African-American.

Fifty years after the Brown v.
Board of Education decision ruled that “separate is unequal,”
the average black K-12 public student in Chicago attends a
school that is 86 percent black. Two hundred and seventy four
schools, (or 47 percent) of the city’s 579 public elementary and
high schools are 90 percent or more African American and 173 of
these schools – or 30 percent of all public schools in the city
– are 100 percent black.

Of the half million blacks living outside Chicago in the six
county Chicago metropolitan area in 1999, 70 percent lived in
Chicago’s Cook County, the great majority residing south of the
central city. More than half (52 percent) of all suburban blacks
reside in just 13 south suburban Cook County towns – this
in a broader metropolitan area that is home to 265 local municipalities.

Under such separatist – dare we say apartheid? – conditions (and
Chicago is no longer the most segregated city in the nation),
large numbers of whites have only the slightest sense of the reality
of black experience. The corporate-electronic visual mass culture
is their main source on that experience and that medium presents
a dangerously schizophrenic image of black America split between
super-successful and largely admirable (not-all-that) black superstars
(Oprah being the best of all) and dangerous (all-too) black perpetrators
(though many successful black athletes and artists inhabit what
seems to be in an intermediary category of their own: successful
perpetrators). The majority of ordinary, hard-working black Americans
who happen to be neither rich nor criminal are amazingly invisible
on television and in the broader white-owned corporate communications
empire.

“We Got the Message…Now Get On With It”

In my teaching and public-speaking experience, you can make progress
with some whites who mistakenly think blacks are now “equal” (or
better) by reminding them that the only blacks they “know” are
on their televisions and citing the relevant disparity statistics.
The really intractable blocks to white racial understanding revolve
around the “why,” not the “what” of racial disparity. Insofar
as stark differences in wealth, health, income, security and general
well-being persist between blacks and whites, the large majority
of white Americans deny that anti-black racism is the cause. Many
whites point to the elimination of numerous discriminatory laws
and barriers as well as the passage of equal employment legislation
and affirmative action as proof that American society “bent over
backwards” to guarantee blacks equal opportunity. Convinced that
racism is no longer a significant problem for blacks, most whites
find the real barriers to black success and equality within the
African-American community itself. If problems for blacks persist,
many whites and some privileged blacks (e.g. John McWhorter at
the Manhattan Institute) think it’s only because too many blacks
engage in “self-sabotaging” behaviors. “As
white America sees it,” note Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown
in their excellent study By The Color of Their Skin: the Illusion
of Integration and the Reality of Race, (2000), “every effort
has been made to welcome blacks into the American mainstream and
now they’re on their own.” In the glorious self-help “New Age,”
it’s all about self-victimization and self-help. The thing is
for black people to conquer their inner demons.

Predominant white attitudes at the
turn of the millennium are well summarized by the comments of
a white respondent to a survey conducted by Essence magazine.
“No place that I’m aware of,” wrote the respondent, “makes [black]
people ride on the back of the bus or use a different restroom
in this day and age. We got the message; we made the corrections
– get on with it.”

Black Bourgeois Victim-Blaming as Music to White Ears

Even among some African-American intellectuals who describe themselves
as “left” and/or “center-left,” there is a tendency in “the post-Civil
Rights” era to question the notion that “race” or (more accurately)
racism is a significant reason for the persistently disproportionate
presence of blacks at the bottom of America’s steep socioeconomic
and institutional hierarchies. In a recent PBS documentary revealingly
titled “America Beyond the Color Line,” Harvard’s reigning black
intellectual Henry Louis “Skip” Gates argues that “class” has
replaced “race” as the main problem for black America. “Class”
for Gates means that that poor blacks need to work harder and
smarter to acquire the skills, education, habits and values possessed
in greater degree by their black economic superiors, including
the leading US imperialist (favorably portrayed in “Beyond The
Color Line”) Colin Powell, who is featured as an example of what
blacks can accomplish when they work hard, study, save and behave
decently.

The main “class problem” that Gates portrayed in “America Beyond”
is that poor blacks just don’t…well…have any (class, that is).
“Unless there is a moral revolution and a revolution in attitude
among our people,” Gates says, “unless [poor blacks] decide to
stay in school, learn the ABCs, not to get pregnant when you’re
16, not to run drugs, not to sell drugs…we’re doomed to have a
relatively small black middle class and huge underclass and never
the twain shall meet. The only way we can succeed in society,”
Gates told the Chicago Tribune in 2003,“is by mastering
the ABCs, staying in school, working hard, deferred gratification.
What’s happened to these values?,” asks Gates.

This was the key theme in Gates’ earlier PBS documentary “Two
Nations.” In that earlier rendition of his version of the “class
over race” thesis, Gates proclaimed that black poverty was about
poor decisions: “deciding to get pregnant or not to have protected
sex. Deciding to do drugs. Deciding not to study. Deciding,
deciding, deciding…”

By my Caucasian experience, this sort
of talk is music to most whites’ ears. The majority of whites
love to see black middle- and upper-class authority figures blame
non-affluent blacks for their own problems. “See,” millions of
American whites murmured after Cosby celebrated the 50th anniversary
of the Brown decision by assaulting the black community’s
“lower economic people”…. “…see this is what I mean. It’s their
own fault. Don’t take it from me, don’t talk about racism,
listen to one of their own. Listen to Bill Cosby.” With the perceived
blessing of Cosby et al., whites are free to ignore numerous racist
policies and practices they are personally responsible for tolerating
and, often enough, perpetrating:

● racial bias in real estate
and home lending that reflects and empowers the refusal of whites
to live next door to blacks

● the proliferation of expensive,
publicly funded suburban and ex-urban roads and developments
that encourage the removal of economic activity and social resources
ever further away the disproportionately black inner city

● the funding of schools largely
on the basis of local property wealth

● excessive use of high-stakes
standardized and related zero-tolerance practices in predominantly
black public schools

● the disproportionate investment
of local public economic development funding dollars to communities
that need assistance the least and the diversion of those funds
away from communities that need those funds the most

● the widespread
mainstream determination to blame poor blacks for their own plight
and to ignore the deep and special historical and related ongoing
societal obstacles to equality faced by African-Americans.

This list goes on.

Racism’s Two Levels

The main problem with the
conventional mainstream white wisdom on the disappearance of racism
is a failure to distinguish adequately between overt and covert
or institutional racism. The first variety of racism has a long
and sordid history. It includes such actions, policies and practices
as the burning of black homes and black churches, the public use
of derogatory racial slurs and epithets, the open banning of blacks
from numerous occupations, the open political disenfranchisement
of blacks and the open segregation of public facilities by race.
It is largely defeated, outlawed and discredited in the US. Witness
the rapid public humiliation and political demotion of Trent Lott,
who lost his position as United States Senate Majority Leader
after he spoke in nostalgic terms about the openly segregationist
1948 Presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond.

The second variety involves
the more impersonal operation of social and institutional forces
and processes in ways that “just happen” but nonetheless serve
to reproduce black disadvantage in the labor market and numerous
other sectors of American life. It includes racially discriminatory
real estate and home-lending practices, residential “white flight”
(from black neighbors), statistical racial discrimination in hiring
and promotion, the systematic under-funding and under-equipping
of schools predominately attended by blacks relative to schools
predominately attended by whites, the disproportionate surveillance,
arrest and incarceration of blacks and much more. It permits whites
to routinely engage in many of the same “self-sabotaging”
behaviors that mainstream U.S. wisdom portrays as the essential
cause of black inequality without experiencing the same degree
of terrible consequences as are visited upon blacks for “bad”
beliefs and actions. Under its reign, poor blacks are lectured
to get their values and behavior together but no wake-up call
is issued for structurally empowered white Americans to stop “deciding,
deciding, deciding” to:

● maintain strict lines of racial segregation between
predominantly black and under funded inner city schools and
predominantly white, affluent, and well-funded suburban school
districts.

● divert hundreds of billions of dollars from social
programs needed to assist the victims of domestic U.S. structural
racism to pay for economically dysfunctional tax cuts that benefit
the disproportionately white opulent few and to pay for an objectively
racist foreign policy that pays its primary dividends to wealthy
whites.

● disinvest in communities of color, helping create the
barren material underpinning for neighborhoods where adults
males with felony records and prison histories are more numerous
than livable wage jobs.

● protect various overseas drug lords who happen to serve
America’s imperial objectives while conducting a massive domestic
anti-narcotics campaign that is significantly less effective
and much more expensive than treatment when it comes to mitigating
the ravages of substance abuse and generates the critical raw
material (black bodies) for the nation’s remarkable, globally
unmatched and white-run prison industrial complex.

● go easy with affluent white corporate and high-state
criminals who devastate untold lives and communities with fraudulent
practices and schemes while consigning hundreds of thousands
of poor blacks to hard time in violent mass incarceration facilities
for small-time narcotics transgressions that are deemed unworthy
of imprisonment in every other nation in the democratic world.

● subvert the meaning and significance of American democracy
by constructing a preposterously expensive, big-money and big-media-dominated
“winner-take-all” election system that makes it absurdly difficult
for racial, ethnic, and ideological minorities to translate
their vital needs and perspectives into policy.

● attack “affirmative action” college
admissions practices that help try to marginally compensate a
minority of blacks for centuries of structural racism while maintaining
silence over “legacy” admissions practices that reward predominantly
white applicants (i.e., Harvard and Yale graduate George W. Bush)
for being born into a family that attended the same school in
the past.

The “Oprah Effect” and the Foretold Price of Civil
Rights Victory

Richly enabled by policymakers
who commonly declare allegiance to anti-racist ideals, the second,
deeper level of racism has an equally ancient history that has
more than merely outlived open, public American racism
and the passage of civil rights legislation. Covert racism may
actually be deepened by these civil rights victories and
by related partial black upward mobility into the middle and upper
classes insofar as those victories and achievements have served
to encourage the illusion that racism has disappeared and that
the only obstacles left to African-American success and equality
are internal to individual blacks and their community – the idea
that, in Derrick Bell’s phrase, “the indolence
of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic
gaps separating the races.” Indeed, “it’s
hard,” Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown note, “to blame [white and even
some black] people” for believing – falsely in Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown’s
view – that racism is dead in America “when our public life is
filled with repeated affirmations of the integration ideal and
our ostensible progress towards achieving it.”

“There are [now] enough examples
of successful middle-class African-Americans,” Georgetown law
professor Sheryl Cashin notes, “to make many whites believe that
blacks have reached parity with them. The fact that some blacks
now lead powerful mainstream institutions offers evidence to whites
that racial barriers have been eliminated; the issue now is individual
effort.” The “odd black family on the block or the Oprah effect
– examples of stratospheric black success – feed,” Cashin observes,
“these misperceptions, even as relatively few whites live among
and interact daily with blacks of their own standing.” Episodes
and events like the brief humiliation of Lott or the election
of a black Mayor or U.S. Senator or City Hall’s criticism of racist
sentiments on the part of bigoted white firemen offer opportunities
for public officials and the broader mass culture to pat
themselves on their back for advancing beyond the primitive state
of open racism even while they promote policies that dig the hole
of more covert institutional or societal racism yet deeper.

Martin Luther King. Jr. sensed some of the danger here at the
outset. He noted in 1967 that “many whites hasten to congratulate
themselves on what little progress [black Americans] have made.
I’m sure,” King opined, “that most whites felt that with the passage
of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically
solved. Most white people are so removed from the life of the
average Negro,” King added, “there has been little to challenge
that assumption.”

“Change Your Life,” Not the System: The Full Effect

Oprah’s usefulness in fueling white racism denial goes beyond
the fact that she is one of the richest people in the world –
sufficiently wealthy to periodically hand out millions of dollars
worth of consumer goodies to hundreds of assembled middle-class
white women in her studio audience. The full toxic “Oprah effect”
is also about the how of her ascendancy. Like Powell, Rice,
and perhaps now Obama, Oprah is perceived by many whites as succeeding
because she’s “not all that black,” as Powell once described himself:
because she has absorbed dominant white middle- and upper-class
“self-help” values and rejects the supposedly obsolete and dysfunctional
effort to make white America face up to – and pay for – its racist
structures, policies, and practices, past and present.

It’s a carefully cultivated perception. With her army of disproportionately
Caucasian counselors, personal trainers, fitness consultants,
personal chefs, massage therapists, interior designers, and New
Age healers, Oprah has taken an “inner journey” toward primarily
personal healing and accountability and away from the collective
struggle for racial equality and social justice. “The other kids
were all into black power,” Oprah told the Tribune in the
mid-1980s. But “I wasn’t a dashiki kind of woman … Excellence
was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy.”
As her programming became ever more racially “sanitized” during
the 1990s, Elaine Brown notes (in her excellent book The Condemnation
of Little B [Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002]), Oprah’s emphasis
focused on “providing …comfort to what became her core audience
of white women, in the form of ‘lifestyle’ and glamour ‘makeovers,’
diets, and New Age self-healing readings and practices and endless
self-deprecating discourse over her own weight and ‘nappy’ hair.”
“Winfrey carefully avoided using her unparalleled power and voice
on behalf of black women,” Brown bitterly observes, “even as the
political agenda pounded poor black women and their children ever
deeper into poverty and degradation.”

Today, while American inequalities of class and color are worsened
by racist imperial adventure in the Middle East, Oprah trumpets
and exemplifies narcissistic personal obsession, egoistic wealth
accumulation, and the narrow pursuit of individual “excellence”
amidst permanent, unchallenged, and brutal social injustice. In
Oprah’s world, it’s all about how to “Change Your Life,” a slogan
that does not mean engaging with fellow African Americans, other
people of color, and white allies in the difficult and often dirty
struggle to challenge hierarchy and democratize society. It’s
mainly about private color-blind solutions and personal experience.
It means working with what Brown calls “a group of whites possessing
curious credentials” (New Age healers and consultants), the great
struggle to look and feel better inside the smaller circles of
daily life – circles that happen, in Oprah’s case, to be situated
at the super-opulent heights of a grotesquely unequal societal
pyramid that grants more than 2 billion world citizens less than
a dollar a day on which to live the good life that is sold in
Oprah’s show and magazine.

As for the participants in the upcoming and aforementioned “black
tie event” (the Academy Awards), it is worth recalling the meaner
side of black upper-class elitism, expressed by Chris Rock in
his popular routine “Niggas vs. Black People.” Rock divides black
America into two classes, Cosby’s “lower economic people” being
the “Niggas.” “I love black people,” Rock says, “but I hate niggas!
Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Klu Klux Klan.”

Now there’s something for Oprah’s predominantly white audience
to get teary-eyed about, after a bit of advice on how to decorate
their next palatial Hollywood mansion more perfectly in accord
with the unmet needs of their inner child.

Paul Street (pstreet99@sbcglobal.net) is the author of
Empire
and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11
(Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) and Still Separate,
Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago
(Chicago, IL: The Chicago Urban League, April 2005